WHEN CAL ASKED TREY for his help, he insisted she buy him dinner first. So, with the jalapeño poppers and the bottle of Jäger taking up most of the table, the interior glass wall of the conference room made me feel less like a fish in a tank and more like a fish in a contact lens.

“I thought we’d go over the Culver case, get Trey up to speed for tomorrow,” I started when we’d all sat. Cal nodded and opened her binder, and Trey opened a paper napkin and placed it on his lap.

“Cal is a beautiful name. Is it short for something?”

“She already went over this. Calamity Ganon. Like in Legend of Zelda? A Nintendo game.”

Trey reached for the bottle of Jäger and examined the label before unscrewing the cap and inhaling over it, deeply.

“We don’t have video games here,” Trey went on as he poured, his voice smooth as a soft-serve machine with a faulty thermostat. Each word sloshed forth sticky and empty-sweet. “Well, except those ones where you bludgeon hookers to death. Those are here, but we’re not allowed to play them. They’re just for the Third Floor’s Retribution Management Department.”

“Why?” Cal asked, nodding just slightly when Trey offered to pour her a glass. He didn’t once look at me.

“You were there; wouldn’t you know?” I said. I didn’t want any Jäger anyway.

Cal shook her head.

“You see, they take all the incomers who killed hookers in real life and embed their real human consciousnesses into the codes of the hookers in the video game, and then beam them out into millions of horny psychos’ PlayStations.”

He piled poppers onto both paper plates he took from the kitchen, despite Cal’s polite refusal.

“And then what?”

Trey paused to suck the grease from his fingers, slipping each one into the wet pulp of his mouth, then out, then in again.

“They live and die like that over and over for eternity,” he answered. “That’s what.”

“Karmic justice,” I said.

“I’ll show you Karmic Just Tits.”

I rolled my eyes too hard to see Cal’s reaction, but I could imagine it was about the same as mine.

“I mean it; she works at the Honey Pot on Wednesdays.”

“Trey, we need you to use your memory clearance to get some information out of our guy,” I said loudly, my binder sticking in a puddle of ranch dressing. Trey stiffened at the inevitable conclusion that this was, in fact, a business meeting, until Cal put her hand on his arm.